Matt Taibbi’s Class Warfare is Truthy and Depressing

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In his new book, Griftopia, Matt Taibbi tries to portray America as a thieve’s paradise, where foreign and domestic moneyed interests fleece the rest of us in the open and we are powerless to resist. Taibbi covers politics and, more recently, the financial crisis for Rolling Stone, and Griftopia is primarily a compilation of his recent feature stories. It’s an entertaining but ultimately frustrating and unsatisfying read, long on adjectives and invective but sorely lacking depth of analysis or reporting. Ultimately, Taibbi undermines himself: his assertions of fact, even regarding core points, often are colored past reality and occasionally are simply, provably wrong, discrediting the wild-eyed conclusions he reaches based on them.

Prior to the financial crisis, some of Taibbi’s best-known work, collected in previous books, involved politics and campaigns. This work, in tone as much as subject matter, implicitly invokes that of Hunter S. Thompson, who famously covered politics for Rolling Stone during the Nixon years, although Taibbi’s book on the 2004 campaign, Spanking the Donkey, pales in comparison to Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72, probably the high point of Thompson’s career. Thompson’s stories often were filled with foul-mouthed, fractured and impossibly weird or vile allegations regarding its subjects, expanding or exploding reality to reflect some otherwise-inaccessible greater Truth. There doesn’t seem to be any greater Truth beyond the paranoia of Taibbi’s furious language, but in these Glenn Beck and Stephen Colbert days, what does it matter? Fear sells.

The emotional core of the book lies in a rant that closes a chapter describing the creation and progression of the mortgage crisis:

At the tail end of all this frantic lying, cheating, and scamming on all sides, … the final result is that we all ended up picking up the tab, subsidizing all this crime and dishonesty and pessimism as a matter of national policy.

We paid for this instead of a generation of health insurance, or an alternative energy grid, or a brand-new system of roads and highways. With the $13-plus trillion we are estimated to ultimately spend on the bailouts, we could not only have bought and paid off every single subprime mortgage in the country (that would only have cost $1.4 trillion), we could have paid off every remaining mortgage of any kind in this country — and still have had enough money left over to buy a new house for every American who does not already have one.

But we didn’t do that, and we didn’t spend the money on anything else useful, either. Why? For a very good reason. Because we’re no good any more at building bridges and highways or coming up with brilliant innovations in energy or medicine. We’re shit now at finishing massive public works projects or launching brilliant fairy-tale public policy ventures like the moon landing.

What are we good at? Robbing what’s left. When it comes to that, we Americans have no peer.

Well, if he’s right, then America is truly Fucked. Time to hit the road, bub. Luckily for us, however, Taibbi is dead wrong about the $13 trillion figure, and, as a result, America may not be hopeless after all.

Sure, it’s been reported that the total potential cost of the bailouts is $12.8 trillion, true, but the crucial word there is “potential.” $12.8 trillion is the potential total cost if every dollar the government pledged or loaned were actually paid out and never paid back.

But that’s not what’s happening. Much of the money loaned already has been repaid, and on some of the constituent “bailouts,” the government actually may make a profit. And, likewise, much of the money used to guarantee assets will never be tapped. This is a good thing for America. And it’s also a distinction that a professional reporter who has been knee-deep in the financial crisis should have recognized before proclaiming the moral bankruptcy of the country. It would be a devastating passage if it weren’t fundamentally untrue.

Look, I agree with Taibbi, at least in spirit, on some issues he raises, but if you’re going to be caustic and depressing and a brutal buzzkill I think you have a responsibility to make sure your facts are correct, especially a fact that forms the crux of both the chapter it ends and of the central depressing accusations of the entire book. And because the subjects Taibbi covers – securitized mortgage instruments, the commodity markets, etc., — are hyper-complex, I had trouble putting any faith in Taibbi’s understanding and descriptions of the details once I noticed that he whiffed on a few of those that I already understood.

Taibbi carries his populist flag throughout the book, and in the final chapter acknowledges proudly that class warfare is one of his goals while asserting that those who panned his Goldman Sachs article were with Them in this great battle, and not Us, claiming that the criticisms of his piece amounted to nothing more than a defense of “class privilege.” Like so much else in Griftopia, this is fun and entertaining, sure, but lazy. Had Taibbi’s article been about “class privilege” and seriously wrestled with the structure and institutions of the American economy that led to the problems he identified, it explicitly or implicitly would have suggested solutions. Instead, Taibbi aims for the fattened ducks operating the levers of power rather than the levers themselves: he seems quite proud, for example, of publicly calling Goldman chief Lloyd Blankfein a “motherfucker.”

Griftopia portrays America as a ghetto being looted by evil drug lords, but a simpler explanation of the financial crisis, to me at least, seems to be the economics of laziness and arrogance. Laziness in entering a trade that is working (here, seemingly safe mortgage bonds) not because it makes sense but because it is easy and arrogance in assuming that you will know precisely when to get out. And the evidence from the last bubble (and the tech bubble before that) seems to be that as good as these Wall Street folks may have been at riding a massive wave to shore, few knew how to pull off before the wave broke.

On Griftopia’s back cover, Taibbi’s publishers praise him via pull quote as supplanting Michael Lewis as the “King Writer of Wall Street.” Not so fast. Lewis’s most recent book, The Big Short, walks the reader through the last few years of economic crisis with a level head and enough detail to allow a reader to understand how decisions that almost brought down the world could have seemed so common sense at the time to those who made them. Lewis’s book handles the complexity of the financial world with both grace and precision. Taibbi’s approach is closer to a drunken swagger: seemingly smooth, but not necessarily precise.

To be fair, Griftopia and The Big Short serve different audiences. Taibbi’s book will be of greatest utility to those who know exactly what they think but aren’t quite sure why. Lewis’s book well serves everyone else.

Is he alive, or is he dead? There are moments in this very funny, very ghoulish novella when he seems definitely one or the other; other moments when he might somehow be both. He's roughly the fictional equivalent of Schrödinger's cat.

Don DeLillo has said that his mammoth Underworld emerged from the juxtaposition of two headlines on the front page of a 1954 New York Times. One trumpeted a pennant-winning home run by the Giants’ Bobby Thomson. The other announced that the Russians had tested their first atomic bomb. Each, in its own way, was a shot heard ’round the world.For anyone paying attention, the International section of this Saturday’s Times offered a similarly suggestive juxtaposition: three articles on a single page reported suspicious events in and around Vladimir Putin’s Russia. To wit: The Kremlin informed a group of dissident journalists that they were going to be evicted from their offices. Leaders of an opposition party, detained by police on thin pretenses, were forced to miss a protest rally. And the government of Estonia, which had offended Russian nationalists by taking down a monument to Soviet soldiers, had its Internet service disrupted by a ferocious denial-of-service attack (which originated from Russian servers). In each case, the reporter hesitated to blame Putin directly, but the overall picture is grim. And this is not even to mention the radiation poisoning plots, or the Chechen conflict. Basically, the man our president once certified as “a good soul” is consolidating power with a kommissarial zeal. The mystery is why the Russian people, after seven decades of totalitarian misrule and centuries of feudalism, are putting up with it.A quick answer might be that, after the economic deprivations of the Communist era, they’re willing to trade freedom for a little prosperity. A more complicated one (not unrelated to the rise of ethnic gangs in Iraq) might involve the psychological toll totalitarianism exacts on its masses. Call it The Captive Mind, or Stockholm Syndrome, but it’s basically a protection racket: authority seems to offer insurance against violence, where freedom seems to leave one exposed. Give a kid enough bruises, and he’s likely to get in line behind the schoolyard bully. The problem comes when the bully runs out of other victims.But a reading of Tatyana Tolstaya’s splendid contemporary novel The Slynx reminds us that the thirst for freedom and the hunger for authority are not merely the byproducts of Russia’s recent history. Rather, they are the reacting agents in much of the finest Russian literature. They lend the novels of Tolstaya’s great-uncle Leo – and the poems quoted by her characters in The Slynx – their signature phosphorescence. In the great American novel, the imperative to submit to something larger than oneself – tradition, law, religion – is usually an obstacle. Our Augies and Ishmaels and Rabbits set out to find their freedom. In Tolstoy’s Levin and Dostoevsky’sKaramazovs, individualism alternates – sometimes on the same page – with a sense that a greater freedom comes in accepting one’s duty and place in the world.Is this a radical simplification? Of course. But I feel licensed to make it. No one likes to speculate about the Russian soul more than the Russians. I want to emphasize here that The Slynx succeeds, radiantly, as a self-contained work of art. But a view to Russia’s literary and political history can only enrich one’s reading.The protagonist of The Slynx is a “golubchik” named Benedikt – born a century after a nuclear catastrophe has leveled Moscow and erased most cultural memory. Benedikt is a simple fellow, subsisting on mice and eking out an existence as a scrivener. He unquestioningly copies the decrees and poems written by Fyodor Kuzmich, the chief Murza of the village – even when those poems seem suspiciously Pushkinesque. Benedikt’s life strikes us as a nightmare of deprivation, but because he has nothing to compare it to, he doesn’t know it. His only inkling is a melancholy feeling that comes over him from time to time, which he blames on a mythical predator said to live in the forest… The Slynx.Like a Russian George Saunders, Tolstaya creates a sci-fi bizarro world seemingly without effort – the details are there when she reaches for them. And, like Saunders, she renders her world in an entirely original idiom. Her depictions of life in the village of Fyodor-Kuzmichsk (natch) leaven poetic stream of consciousness with a salty and frequently hilarious orality. The effect Tolstaya creates, hovering between second- and third-person narration, is like nothing I’ve ever read. The narrator both is and isn’t Benedikt. Benedikt both is and isn’t us. Here’s a little taste, in Jamey Gambrell’s supple translation:In the summer the Scribe is like an ordinary Golubchik – a sickle on his shoulder and into the fields and glades to cut goosefoot, horsetail. Bring in the sheaves. You tie them up – lug them to the shed, and go back again, another time, once more, all over, run, run, run. While he’s gone the neighbors or a stranger will filch a couple of sheaves for sure, sometimes from the field, sometimes straight from the shed. But that’s all right: they steal from me, and I’ll get good and mad and steal from them, those guys will steal from these guys – and so it goes in a circle. It comes out fair. Everyone steals, but everyone ends up with their own. More or less.For the first half of the book, we keep rooting for him to awaken, like his Anglo counterparts in 1984 and Fahrenheit 451, to the dystopia he’s living in. As he discovers the source of Fyodor Kuzmich’s poems, and develops an appetite for books, consciousness-raising starts to seem inevitable. But – spoiler alert – consciousness will not prove to be synonymous with freedom. In fact, after aiding a putsch, Benedikt will become “Deputy for Defense and Marine and Oceanic Affairs.” Rather than living out his books, he seems content to live in them. More Bovary than Quixote.Tolstaya is well-known in Russia as a television personality and an outspoken critic. She began her first and only novel under Gorbachev and finished it under Putin. In the West, where knowledge is seen as a path to freedom, the plot trajectory she arrived at may strike some readers as perverse. What at first seems an allegory of Communism becomes something more unsettling: an examination of our universal frailty.In light of what’s happening in Moscow right now, the final pages of The Slynx take on a resonance almost too painful to countenance. History is not only a nightmare… in Russia, it seems to be a recurring one. Tolstaya preserves the possibility of an awakening, of a more personal socialism or a more collective freedom. But she’s not optimistic.

Dmitri Shostakovich was, by Julian Barnes’s reckoning, a coward. The leading composer of Joseph Stalin and Nikita Khrushchev’s USSR, Shostakovich never stood up to power; he was a constant compromiser, accepting what was asked of him by Soviet leaders and giving speeches written by party ideologues. When Soviet Culture Commissar Andrei Zhdanov lectured Soviet artists on the merits of socialist realism and the ills of formalism, ordering them to follow the Zhdanov Doctrine (“The only conflict that is possible in Soviet culture is the conflict between good and best”), Shostakovich did not oppose this shallow culture commissar. He was even compelled to join, in a music congress in New York, the public denunciation of the Soviet Union’s leading exiled composer Igor Stravinsky. In return, Shostakovich was rewarded with every available prize the party handed out to the faithful.

The opening chapter of The Noise of Time, Barnes’s portrait of the composer, puts us on the platform of a train station. The scene seems to come directly out of an Alfred Hitchcock film. A beggar (“the man — in reality half a man”) propels himself using a strange vehicle, “a low trolley with wooden wheels” that can only be steered by wrenching at “the contraption’s front edge.” In order to avoid overbalancing, the beggar uses a “rope that passed underneath the trolley [and] was looped through the top of his trousers.”

This Beckettian beggar’s only concern is to make it to the end of each day, and in this he sets an example for other characters in the novel. Like Shostakovich, “he had become a technique for survival. Below a certain point, that was what all men became: techniques for survival.” Not until we reach the end of Barnes’s latest novel do we realize the significance of its sketchy opening scene, reminiscent of the sink scene at the start of Barnes’s Booker-winning, similarly slim novel, The Sense of an Ending. The scene conceals in it Shostakovich’s Rosebud, the mystery of which drives the reader throughout the book.

Barnes has composed The Noise of Time like a piece of orchestral music. The third-person narrative features numerous leitmotifs: the fear of detainment, the obsession with being on the right side of the party line, the fear of getting blacklisted from Soviet concert halls — none of which had been fears of a paranoid mind: Shostakovich experienced them all. His life was shaped by a series of catastrophes.

Shostakovich came from an urban Saint Petersburg family. His mother had danced the mazurka in front of Nicholas II; after the death of her husband, she took menial jobs to support her two daughters and “a musically precocious son of fifteen.” Shostakovich’s first public performance at the Small Hall of the Moscow Conservatoire was a sad affair. But it had an ostensibly positive outcome: he met Marshal Tukhachevsky, a patron of arts, who helped the young Shostakovich get on with his career (and would eventually get him into serious trouble).

In between 1926 and the premieres of his first masterpieces in the mid-1930s, Shostakovich had already faced numerous hostilities. At the Conservatoire, leftist students tried to have him dismissed; the Russian Association of Proletarian Musicians had accused him of being part of the bourgeois stranglehold on the arts and campaigned for his blacklisting. In 1929, at the age of 23, he was denounced, on the grounds that his music was “straying from the main road of Soviet art;” he was accused of formalism by youth organizations.

But it was in 1936, with the publication of a Pravda article on the day after the performance of his Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk that Shostakovich’s real troubles began. In a powerfully imagined and chillingly lucid scene, Barnes depicts the composer anxiously watching the government box in the concert hall, across from the director’s box where he was stood. “Stalin was hidden behind a small curtain, an absent presence to whom the other distinguished comrades would sycophantically turn, knowing that they were themselves observed,” we are told. “Given the occasion, both conductor and orchestra were understandably nervous.”

Soon afterwards, on the third page of Pravda, the ominous headline, written probably by Stalin, stabbed a knife in him: MUDDLE INSTEAD OF MUSIC. Shostakovich’s music quacked, grunted and growled, according to the paper; it had a “nervous, convulsive and spasmodic” nature. It “tickled the perverted taste of the bourgeois with its fidgety, neurotic music.”

The next year, in the spring of 1937, Shostakovich had his first direct conflagration with Soviet power when he was dispatched to the party building on Liteiny Prospekt. There he was questioned by a certain Zakrevsky, who asked him about Marshal Tukhachevsky, accused of plotting to assassinate Stalin. Barnes does an excellent job at depicting the psychology of his protagonist during the days when Shostakovich believed his life was about to come to an end. “They always came for you in the middle of the night,” we are informed. “And so, rather than be dragged from the apartment in his pajamas, or forced to dress in front of some contemptuously impassive NKVD man, he would go to bed fully clothed, lying on top of the blankets, a small case already packed on the floor beside him.”

Terrified and unable to think about anything besides power, Shostakovich started spending his nights by the lift, watching the opening of the elevator, waiting for the arrival NVKD men in terror. We watch Shostakovich as he kisses his wife and holds his child one last time before taking the bus to the gray building where he expects to be deported to a labor camp. “He was always punctual, and would go to his death being punctual. He gazed briefly at the River Neva, which would outlast them all.” A set of chance events (it turns out that Zaykrevsky has himself been arrested) helped Shostakovich get off the hook. But the experience has a transformative effect on him; the composer spent the rest of his life fearing the repetition of such a chilling experience. Barnes chronicles how, years later in 1949, the terror returns to Shostakovich’s life with his dismissal from his professorships at Moscow and Leningrad conservatories. The performance of his music are banned. Another miraculous event saved him when the telephone rings in March 1949, and the composer hears the magical words: “Stalin is about to come on the line.”

I was particularly impressed by this scene that brings to mind Louis Althusser’s concept of hailing: we become subjects as we answer to the hail of power — be it the policeman on the street or Comrade Stalin on the phone. The voice of power first asks the artist how he is and only learns that Shostakovich is suffering from stomach ache. Who in his case wouldn’t? “I am sorry to hear that. We shall find a doctor for you,” power says. Shostakovich informs him about his blacklisting; one word from power can surely fix that. And it indeed does. “The mistake will be corrected,” Stalin says. “None of your works has been forbidden. They can all be freely played. This has always been the case.”

Throughout the rest of this moving book, Barnes takes us inside the composer’s mind, observing how he reacts to the ceaseless demands of power. As power gradually thorns apart his soul, Shostakovich learns how to be a strategist. He is a cunning, silent character (not unlike James Joyce’s alter-ego Stephen Dedalus), but chooses not to live in exile, which might potentially save him. Barnes shows how being a coward is not easy as you think. “To be a hero, you only had to be brave for a moment,” he writes. “When you took out the gun, threw the bomb, pressed the detonator, did away with the tyrant, and with yourself as well. But to be a coward was to embark on a career that lasted a lifetime. You couldn’t even relax.”

Barnes convincingly argues that it is precisely due to his cowardly qualities (these are very English qualities, according to Barnes) that Shostakovich was a hero. He did not make a show of his soul in public speeches or political statements; he was a misfit, an emotional rebel but only from the inside; only by being strategic was he able to preserve his artistic self in the face of party hostility and oppression.

The day after I finished The Noise of Time I started listening to Shostakovich albums on Spotify — I became fixated on the preludes. You should, too. I had little idea that a text could inflict such an effect on music. But there it was. As I listened to his “Prelude and Fugue no. 4,” all the pains Shostakovich took, all the paranoid acts Barnes meticulously details in his book, suddenly made sense. The introvert misfit whose public persona was so unlikable reveals himself fully in those notes.

If Shostakovich succumbed to power, it was in an effort to leave the world with beauty that cannot be marred by power. The composer’s real feat had been to be able to produce such fugues and preludes while mechanically submitting: as politics killed Shostakovich from inside, his misfit, soul remained magnificently alive in his fugues and preludes. Shostakovich, in his forced cowardice, found his own revolution in his music.

11 comments:

How about you read some information from William K. Black, the regulator brought in to fix our last big banking scandal, the Savings and Loan crisis of the 80’s?

Here is what a tough regulator who had over 1,000 fraudulent bankers thrown in prison a couple of decades ago has to say about our current crisis:

“There was fraud at every step in the home finance food chain: the appraisers were paid to overvalue real estate; mortgage brokers were paid to induce borrowers to accept loan terms they could not possibly afford; loan applications overstated the borrowers’ incomes; speculators lied when they claimed that six different homes were their principal dwelling; mortgage securitizers made false reps and warranties about the quality of the packaged loans; credit ratings agencies were overpaid to overrate the securities sold on to investors; and investment banks stuffed collateralized debt obligations with toxic securities that were handpicked by hedge fund managers to ensure they would self destruct.

That homeowners would default on the nonprime mortgages was a foregone conclusion throughout the industry — indeed, it was the desired outcome. This was something the lending side knew, but which few on the borrowing side could have realized. ”

Mr Teslik, you really need to do better research before playing the critic. For starters, the “we might make a profit from TARP” line is a little stale. “TARP only represents a slice (~10%) of the total federal funds disbursed to the financial sector through the bailout. The back door bailouts provided to Wall St by the Fed are where the real action is.

The Wall St Bailout Cost Table by Sourcewatch is worth checking out — essentially a peer reviewed running tally of the total bailout outlay to date, updated monthly. It notably excludes the automotive bailouts or any initiatives for job creation.

“And because the subjects Taibbi covers – securitized mortgage instruments, the commodity markets, etc., — are hyper-complex, I had trouble putting any faith in Taibbi’s understanding and descriptions of the details once I noticed that he whiffed on a few of those that I already understood.”

If you are going to make a statement like that you might have to show at least a few more errors in fact contained in the book. You mention only the bailout figure – which you erroneously conflate with only the TARP money – but then fail to illustrate any other colorings or errors in fact. If, in fact, the assertions you make are true, this review needs to be much longer and have more research included.

Sounds like sour grapes Derek. The fact that you start off the review by putting Glenn Beck and Stephen Colbert on the same plane was very telling. Oh, too bad that Taibbi is a “brutal buzzkill” in these promising economic times where people are getting booted from their houses because of Wall Street greed! God forbid he actually call a spade a spade. If you want someone to paint the crisis in daisies and roses you’re better off getting your financial analysis from the Wall Street Journal or CNBC.

Heh. I guess I touched a nerve with some folks. One dude on twitter added me to his “asshole list.” Fair enough. But, bulfinch and James, do either of you argue that Taibbi was accurate with his statement that the U.S. government will spend more than $13 Trillion on the bailouts? The Sourcewatch table that Bulfinch linked quotes indicates a current total outstanding of less than $2 Trillion.

Look, nicolas, yes, call a spade a spade, but if you’re going to do so, get your facts right. I’m disappointed with Taibbi because this country needs fearless journalists to dive into these subjects and emerge unafraid, doing what Taibbi tried to to but failed. This is all too Important to take the shortcuts that litter Griftopia.

The article you linked to in your review is specifically about the TARP program (more specifically about AIG). That is the program that is projected to perhaps make a profit. It is also a small part of the 13 tril. total current outlay. So you did indeed conflate the TARP program with the sum total of government fiscal actions taken thus far.

And to my original point, you again say there are “shortcuts that litter Griftopia”, but still don’t say what they are. You need to come up with more than one example to make a statement like that or else it’s a shortcut.

p.s. Looking at the sourcewatch table, it’s fucking hilarious that the Toxic Asset Purchases of Bear Sterns (RIP) and AIG are called Maiden Lane I,II & III. I totally want the job of naming these programs.

Also, not to elide the question you asked, his phrasing of “$13-plus trillion we are estimated to ultimately spend on the bailouts” doesn’t seem crazy at all.

According to that Sourcewatch table, we currently have dispersed nearly 5 tril. in funds, have nearly 2 tril. outstanding and have nearly 14 tril. more at risk of going out. That seems to put us right in that ball park. This is not a static event, it’s ongoing, and we still have (probably) more rounds of quantitative easing and toxic asset repurchases left, seeing as there are still a year or two of foreclosures directly related to this to wade through. Also, re-looking at the Sourcewatch table, I don’t think that easing (to attempt to “combat deflation”) is included on that chart and I definitely think you can call it a linked cost since it is specifically designed to shore up credit and provide liquidity as a result of the crisis two years ago and it certainly ends up being a straight up bank subsidy anyway as it involves treasury bonds purchased by the government from investment banks at inflated prices. It now stands at 2 tril. + 600 bill. (November 2010), so it seems like we’re getting there.

“Much of the money loaned already has been repaid, and on some of the constituent “bailouts,” the government actually may make a profit…”

Question, Derek: You accuse Matt of crafting conclusions out of thin air sans adequate corroboration. But where are you getting YOUR info from in order to pass the foregoing blanket remark off as fact??

You object to Taibbi’s rhetoric when he states that the money we spent on TARP, pledges and no-interest loans to banks could have easily bought every sub-prime mortgage in the country, or bought national health care whole parcel for a decade, or built an alternative energy grid….but to counter, you state that TARP will probably turn us a small, dozen-to-100 billion profit….and that much of the 12.8 trillion we’ve promised won’t end up being paid out.

The true cost of the bailout is hard to calculate, but in terms of LOSSES to taxpayers, we’ve unquestionably LOST enough in this 12.8 trillion array of programs to cover any of the projects Taibbi cites. None of them cost more than a couple of trillion. And if we had bought the sub-prime mortgages, we’d be leveraged to handle both the current foreclosure crisis and any subsequent crises related to these assets. The fed will likely achieve a bare fraction of the value of these mortgages by purchasing the MBS-es, whereas lien modifications would have brought them much more.

You seem to be saying that because these crimes were the culmination of a thousand ethical “paper cuts”, with hoards of desk jockeys making banal, slightly self-serving decisions and ceding personal responsibility for poor decisions over a decade, that invective isn’t called for and there are no villains. But every single one of those weasels was a villain. The corporate environment is a villain. Human psychology is a villain. The people at the top of the chain reaping hundreds of millions RIGHT NOW as a result of these phenomena- are villains. How is it unfair or unseemly to call spades spades?

It appears you published this article before the Fed finally complied with the courts and disclosed details of this 12.8 trillion package. Have you reviewed those details? Do they qualify your thinking at all, or do you see the potential for us to get all of that 12.8 trillion back?

“Griftopia portrays America as a ghetto being looted by evil drug lords, but a simpler explanation of the financial crisis, to me at least, seems to be the economics of laziness and arrogance.” I actually wish you were right, and that were so – but you’re wrong, and it aint so. By odd circumstances, I was in Phoenix during the mortgage madness, and had two interesting connections: one, a fellow who ran a mortgage company, so I got to see the process from the inside out, witness the “fog a mirror, get a loan” jokes and the actual drooling of the LO’s; two, a fellow who had been chief legal council for Morgan Stanley during the Asian collapse. So I got an education in how that was done, and a glimpse into the folks who have the amoral psyches that allow them to do it – whatever else you can say about them, they’re not lazy. When the crisis hit, I spent a day using what I knew to drive research about what happened. So reading Taibbi, as I’m now doing, is not all news to me – and, according to my background and research, he pretty much got it right. And as for the securitized instruments, CDOs, CDS’s, he’s pretty much on. Whereas you don’t give a single instance in your “review” of where he’s off.
I will read Michael Lewis’ book next. And I actually wish that Taibbi had written his book less sensationally, and with a few less cuss words – because, as a result, I think a lot of people who should read it won’t. I detest that he talks about how we’re no longer good at actually creating anything (end of Hot Potato chapter) because it’s demoralizing and simply not true -as an entrepreneur I take offense. But someone has to get this stuff out there in a manner that folks who fall asleep when the word economic is mentioned will read. For anyone who knows even a percentage of what goes on behind the financial/government doors, the endless spew of BS from our politicians, both left and right, is nothing more than bad entertainment on the Titanic. If we don’t understand what, and who, really moves things, we’re going to keep thinking that oil and food crises come from shortages, and that we fight wars for freedom – we’re going to believe the play. And every few years, we’re going to elect more puppets from the right or left (anachronisms), which will have zero effect on the direction this country, and the world, are going.

Yes, always someone turns up you never dreamt of; and sometimes just as quickly he vanishes, remaining a ghost, a mystery. Literature has always been fascinated with these uncanny entrances and exits, the comings and goings that in life are so commonplace, but that, on the printed page, we often imbue with such significance.

It’s not surprising that it took more than 50 years after his death, for the works of the Dutch writer Nescio to be translated and published in America. It wasn’t until after WWII that he gained any notoriety in the Netherlands and he only became a beloved member of the Dutch canon posthumously. As Joseph O’Neill, author of Netherland, writes in his introduction to Amsterdam Stories, the first collection of Nescio’s work to appear in America, “[Nescio] wrote very little, and he wrote small.” His longest work is 42 pages long. His entire published oeuvre, including editor’s notes and some unpublished fragments, fits in this 161 page volume. Nescio wrote in a handful of years between 1909 and 1942 and almost nothing in the 1920s and 1930s.

Nescio (Latin for “I don’t know”) was the pen name of Jan Hendrik Frederik Grönloh. After briefly falling in with a circle of ambitious artistic youths and applying to join a colony in the Dutch countryside founded by psychiatrist Frederik van Eeden, Grönloh committed himself to a business career in 1904. He married in 1906 and immediately began fathering children, eventually having four daughters. After a series of minor office jobs, he ended up working for the Holland-Bombay Trading company, becoming its director in 1926 and, O’Neill points out, “a notably demanding and severe boss.” Grönloh was as bourgeoisie as could be. What little he published, he published under a pen name to protect his career as a proper Dutch businessman.

Conventional Dutch life wasn’t the only drain on Nescio’s writing time. His first love was not writing, but walking. O’Neill writes, “At a very early age he fell in love with taking walks and as a nine-year old began to go on solitary outings, making written records of his impressions.” In 1899 alone, he walked 522 kilometers. He maintained this relationship with the Dutch landscape for the rest of his life and it became a center of gravity in his work. Remove the time at the office, on a walk, attending one of the social engagements directors of major trading firms were expected to attend, and fulfilling familial obligations, and there just wasn’t much time to write. That J.H.F. Grönloh, the successful businessman, had a writing hobby is not surprising; that Nescio is a brilliant writer is shocking. As O’Neill asks, “How many important artists have been such slight practitioners?” Given how few works in translation are read in America, in general, it is a miracle Nescio got here at all.

Nescio should have gotten here long ago. His work converged with many aspects of American literature and culture. The ragtag circle of artists at the center of his stories could have hung out with Sal Paradise and Dean Moriarty. His eco-spirituality could have inspired the hippies and early environmentalists. Fans of our great walker Thoreau would have found a kindred spirit. Whenever Rimbaud showed up in coffee shops, clubs, and cocktail parties, Nescio could have been his shadow. But Nescio’s absence from our literature is most surprising because of the crushing beauty of his work.

Many of you have been waiting for Amsterdam Stories; those of you who reread “For Esmé – with Love and Squalor,” who had (or have) world changing dreams and no longer know what to do or believe or feel about them, who aren’t sure what to think when sitting in coffee shops watching people walk by, who don’t know what to say when you see an old friend for the first time in years and realize how much you have changed by how much your friend has changed. Who love long walks. Who love sitting by lakes, ponds, and rivers. Who want brave and beautiful stories. Who want fiction to remind us why this is important.

Nescio examines painters, writers, poets, and thinkers at various stages of their lives. We see them full of the irrational passion of youth, crippled by the frustration of middle age in a world that refused to change, conflicted about the success of their bitterest work, and settling into the spiritual acceptance only available to those who can reflect on an entire life. Though there is a sense of longing when he looks back on youth, Nescio celebrates the exuberance and naïveté without being nostalgic. He is Romantic without romanticizing. And even as daily life slowly squeezes the revolution from these characters, even as they give up painting and writing, even as some fall away to madness or complacency, Nescio argues for the artist’s perspective, for the idea that even if you are unable to create, you can still see the world as an endless source of potential.

For me, reading Amsterdam Stories was like watching Casablanca. Much of Casablanca has become cliché. The famous lines are quoted so often, and the famous scenes are such a part of our culture, we’ve seen the movie before we’ve actually seen it. And yet, even though we’ve heard them a hundred times, even though we know they’re coming, the famous lines are still powerful. They are surrounded by such inherent and integral beauty, that what should make us roll our eyes, takes our breath away. In Casablanca we hear “a hill of beans” and “here’s looking at you, kid.” In Amsterdam Stories we read “And I puff on my pipe in all humility, and feel like God himself, who is infinity itself. I sit there aimlessly. God’s aim is aimlessness. But to keep this awareness always is granted to no man.” — from the story “Young Titans.” “Then she stretched out her arms but there was no one to answer her. Then she didn’t know if she wanted to live or die and she slowly rode her bike home, where Mother sat yawning over her Daily News under the gas lamp with her glasses on the tip of her nose,” from “The Little Poet.” “But the Lord is in the great silence and emptiness and in this wondrous end to a monumental day. The day has become mine once more and mine the enchanted world. The sun stands still, there will be no night. Time stands still; pitiless eternity takes pity,” from “Insula Dei.” In other contexts, these passages with their “God” and “live or die” and “eternity” might be overwrought bombast, but, as in Casablanca, the beauty in the fabric of the stories makes the passages transcendent.

Amsterdam Stories is a book of landscape. It is about what words the mind hears when the eyes are truly open, seeing the world as a reason to create. “And the sky got bluer and bluer and the sun shone until it seemed like flowers would have to start sprouting out of the country bumpkins. And the red roofs in the villages and the black trees and the fields…And the road lay there, white and smarting, it couldn’t bear the sunlight, and the glass panes of the village streetlamps flashed, they had trouble withstanding the glare too,” from “Young Titans.” “A stately row of Canadian poplars, a copse here and there. A striking emptiness and silence…And then there’s a fantastic golden cloud above the grain fields, climbing up out of the grain fields, shining and spreading up and to the right…And then something looms up out of the golden matter…And a moment later it’s a wagon piled high with hay,” from “Insula Dei.” It makes me feel the time has come to set out on my “journey westward.”

Finally, Nescio is not afraid to be vague. He lets moments for which language is an ineffective communicator hang on the thinnest scaffolding of words. In “Out Along the Ij,” “[h]is world came in through our eyes and lived in our heads, and our thoughts went wordlessly out across the world, far beyond the horizon they went.” In “Insula Dei,” we see Flip smile “not pathetically anymore but the way you smile at someone who has done you a real favor.” As readers and writers we are taught to seek and strive for precision; an exactness from which individual interpretations can flow. But much of life is vague, inexact, and diffuse. Like the indistinct details in a Van Gogh landscape, Nescio can be meaningful and beautiful without being specific.

Amsterdam Stories easily merged with my own canon, like a flood born stream joining the river. I’ve mentioned “For Esmé – with Love and Squalor,” but Nescio also reminded me of “The Hunger Artist,” “White Nights,” and the last few pages of The Great Gatsby. Stories like epic landscape paintings. Stories like a quiet chat on a river bank with a confidant. Stories like the foggy joyous hangover after a long night of tobacco-infused, coffee-fueled poetry. Beautiful stories. Love poems to life. Grönloh did not live the life of an artist, but Nescio has written one of the great apologies for art. We all struggle through the challenges of life; all the good mothers and fathers, all the diligent businessmen, all the fastidious bureaucrats, all the revolutionaries, all the mainstream politicians, all the over-read students, all the exhausted laborers, all of us. We rely on artists to remind us why that struggle is worth it.